Please return the old level by playing system

[Kalen]

Did you read Jost's post right above mine?

Yup, doesn't change the fact that if he was completely against LBD it was a strange choice for a filler system. Even stranger that the filler system wasn't more in line with what they actually wanted.

 

[Riamus]

How did @Riamus agree to that when he says that what we have IS LBD?

Madmole is against what people generally refer to as LBD, so why wouldn't I agree when BFT2020 said he was against it? When I say what we have is LBD, that is a statement of technicality. If it was the LBD that people are talking about, they wouldn't be asking for LBD. It doesn't change that it's technically LBD because you are DOING things to learn, but it's not the type of LBD that people refer to when speaking of LBD. If it was, every single RPG would be considered LBD.

I point out that it's still learning by doing to get people to realize that what we have is not as unrealistic as they seem to think. And just maybe they'll think about what they are saying. After all, what is the common thing that is inevitably said by most people posting about wanting LBD? That they don't want magazines for one reason or another. Yet, magazines are ONLY for crafting. So you'll see someone complain about magazines, using how "bad" they are as a reason why LBD should be brought back, but that would imply they want LBD for CRAFTING. Yet if someone comments on how crafting 100 axes or whatever was annoying, they'll say that they aren't talking about crafting and crafting doesn't need to be LBD. If it doesn't need to be LBD, why are they using magazines as a reason to go back to LBD? Magazines are only for crafting. If people are asking for LBD specifically for weapon skills or other action skills (i.e. not crafting), there isn't any reason why magazines and LBD can't coexist. Right? People tend not to think about what they are saying and just jump on the bandwagon... "magazines bad, LBD good."

Yup, doesn't change the fact that if he was completely against LBD it was a strange choice for a filler system. Even stranger that the filler system wasn't more in line with what they actually wanted.

We don't know why they chose to add it as a temporary measure. We can guess, but it's kind of pointless to do so as we're most likely going to be wrong and we wouldn't know if we were actually correct. Maybe that was taken directly from Unity Store as was stated (I never saw them say that, but it happened before I was playing this game, so that's no surprise). If so, that could have been the easiest thing to add in order to get some kind of progression of weapons and stuff. That may have just been what they did even if he didn't like it just to get something playable in place. When you're doing stuff in EA instead of behind closed doors, you have to make concessions such as placeholders in order to keep the game playable. Maybe he wasn't against LBD initially and only decided he didn't like it after seeing it in the game. Maybe it's some other reason. In the end, it doesn't really matter. He doesn't like it and is against it being put back into the game, so that's pretty much a nail in the coffin for it except with mods. That doesn't mean he can't change his mind, but it's very unlikely based on what he just recently said about it.

 

[Roland]

I don't remember the early LBD stuff being Unity Store plug and play stuff. What I remember was that from the beginning Joel said he wanted the RPG aspect of the game to play similarly to Fallout. Now Joel will be the first to tell you he is a fan of Skyrim and played the hell out of it and so it is pretty telling that long before any experience gaining or leveling up of characters or tools or weapons was introduced to the game, he had Fallout in mind and not Skyrim. Fallout is perk and skillpoint shopping based and Skyrim is LBD based.

Again, I have doubts that LBD was intended as a placeholder from the moment it was implemented. They never stated that as far as I can remember and I don't know why that story has emerged. I think "placeholder" is used far too much by non TFP staff and for things that weren't always intended as placeholders. Yeah, they ended up being placeholders but that's not what you call a placeholder. I don't think TFP put LBD in at first intentionally to have it be a temporary thing. I think TFP has always enjoyed experimenting with systems and instead of LBD being an intentionally temporary system, it was a system they experimented with and worked on for 5 major updates in about the same number of years and then ultimately settled on what they originally had conceived to be the spiritual progenitor-- Fallout and not Skyrim.

In A11 they took their first step into the RPG elements. You could craft tools and weapons and each time you crafted them they increased in level from 1 to 600. That's all there was for almost a year. Over the next few years they experimented a lot but it was clear to see that LBD began disappearing from the design. They removed it from crafting altogether in A15 I believe and you could spend skillpoints or use LBD to increase skills in A16. Finally, in A17 LBD was removed entirely.

Maybe Joel played a lot of Skyrim during A11-A14 and then started getting back into Fallout from A15 onward because the model slowly relinquished LBD and fully embraced skillpoint purchasing. But I'm almost 100% certain that they were all TFP designs and coding and nothing store bought. Also, I remember the rise of skillpoint purchasing and the diminishing of LBD to be over a few major updates. It wasn't LBD 100% in A16 and then Skillpoint Shopping 100% in A17 like they took out Module A (supposed placeholder) and replaced it with Module B. It was a lot more of an organic development process than that.

 

[Roland]

Yup, doesn't change the fact that if he was completely against LBD it was a strange choice for a filler system. Even stranger that the filler system wasn't more in line with what they actually wanted.

He's against LBD NOW as a designer of THIS game but I wouldn't say he is generally opposed to LBD-- especially as a player. He played Skyrim and loved it. I know he played Valheim and had good things to say about that game as well. Both he and Rick were very complimentary of Valheim when it first came out. I think they wanted to try LBD and as I said above not necessarily as a filler system. If they would have turned out to be happy with it then it wouldn't have been the filler system. But at some point, as designers, they decided against it for this game and it diminished markedly in A15 to A16 to completely in A17.

They explored that possibility and ultimately rejected it for what we have now. It is not an objectively worse system. Its just some people prefer what we had and others prefer what we have now. As Joel stated either earlier in this thread or in another thread, the gamer population grew way beyond what it used to be starting in A18 and there are many people who never experienced A16 or before and are very pleased with the gameplay the current progression system offers.

 

[Kalen]

He's against LBD NOW as a designer of THIS game but I wouldn't say he is generally opposed to LBD-- especially as a player. He played Skyrim and loved it. I know he played Valheim and had good things to say about that game as well. Both he and Rick were very complimentary of Valheim when it first came out. I think they wanted to try LBD and as I said above not necessarily as a filler system. If they would have turned out to be happy with it then it wouldn't have been the filler system. But at some point, as designers, they decided against it for this game and it diminished markedly in A15 to A16 to completely in A17.

They explored that possibility and ultimately rejected it for what we have now. It is not an objectively worse system. Its just some people prefer what we had and others prefer what we have now. As Joel stated either earlier in this thread or in another thread, the gamer population grew way beyond what it used to be starting in A18 and there are many people who never experienced A16 or before and are very pleased with the gameplay the current progression system offers.

Yeah, to be honest, I pretty much assumed it was something like this.... I was, in a very passive aggressive way, disputing the statement that Joel was "completely against LBD".

 

[Jost Amman]

@Roland
I can't bring proof of this, since it was a long time ago, and honestly I have no dog in this race... but I definitely remember someone from the "inner circle" of TFP stating at some point that the LBD system "of old" started from a Unity asset buy (and that was of course later adapted/plugged in for the game, but still).

Also, I'm not sure if it was someone from TFP calling LBD a "filler", but surely must have been, to the least, someone from the moderators ranks, that started this narrative. So maybe at the time I was misguided into making their "opinion" becoming the truth? I should only trust what comes directly from the developers from now on I guess.

So, I guess I can't fully trust you either.

 

[Kalen]

Also, I'm not sure if it was someone from TFP calling LBD a "filler"

I'm almost positive you are correct about that, but I think they called it a "placeholder". I never bought that narrative, though. They've gone through, what, 4 different skill systems so far? You don't do that if its intended to be a placeholder. You do that if you're trialing different systems to see what works and what doesn't. At the end of the day, it really doesn't matter what we call it, we are where we are and I don't suspect its going to change. But I believe that if the LBD worked out in a way TFP liked, they would've kept it which means it was not "filler"

 

[Jost Amman]

I'm almost positive you are correct about that, but I think they called it a "placeholder". I never bought that narrative, though. They've gone through, what, 4 different skill systems so far? You don't do that if its intended to be a placeholder. You do that if you're trialing different systems to see what works and what doesn't. At the end of the day, it really doesn't matter what we call it, we are where we are and I don't suspect its going to change. But I believe that if the LBD worked out in a way TFP liked, they would've kept it which means it was not "filler"

Yeah, thanks, that's the right word they used... "placeholder".

In any case I'm totally with them on trying things out and changing idea.
I'm not one of those "BUT YOU PROMISED!!" guys that sometimes you see around here.

 

[theFlu]

but it's not the type of LBD that people refer to when speaking of LBD.

This is the problem; you're single-handedly trying to break the term. The term means something, like "airplane". Technically your room is filled with airplanes, almost an infinite number of them; only limited by the width of an air molecule. You just have to "read" the settled term completely wrong to reach that conclusion.